I haven't used my flickr account for ages, since they made it mandatory to have a Yahoo ID to log in. I have no desire to be a yahoo customer, the company has tried too many times to foist me off with the yahoo toolbar. They are too pushy for my tastes. I wanted to close the flickr account but to do that I had to log in with a Yahoo ID (Catch 22) so it was a job I kept putting off.
I decided to bite the bullet and do it. So that yahoo wouldn't be able to spam me I created a mail account with http://mailexpire.com and used that to create a yahoo ID. mailexpire gave me a transient email address that will expire in a few hours time. All email sent to this address is forwarded to my own address. It took me three tries to get the illegible yahoo captcha right and I was given the usual wilkinsonpeter321 kind of ugly yahoo loser email address. I used it to delete the flickr account and then I deleted the yahoo ID which was barely ten minutes old.
Time will tell whether mailexpire start sending me spam...
I noticed this on the Yahoo sign-up site:
NOTICE: We collect personal information on this site.
I'm not sure if this is a 'may contain nuts' kind of warning for a sign-up page that asks me for my name or if it means something more sinister.
Peter's Moblog
